


Bright Colors of the Sith

by Darth_Nonie



Category: Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace
Genre: Backstory, F/M, M/M, Multi, Points of View
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2001-03-19
Updated: 2001-03-19
Packaged: 2018-02-11 21:20:01
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,646
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2083527
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Darth_Nonie/pseuds/Darth_Nonie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Is it really wise to see all the world as only Light and Dark, and consider love a weakness?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Bright Colors of the Sith

I knew he was was on Tattooine as soon as I landed. I could feel him like a chill in the air, this least honorable of the Council's secret assassins. This Jinn.

Yoda's apprentice.

I let my fury shudder through me until the very air around me sang with it. Yoda himself I could not touch; his death was foretold and I had no part in it, and so my master forbade me him. But his student... This one was mine.

I listened to the winds, rejoicing in their subtle song even as I opened myself to the colors of the dusk and let my mind seek beyond.

No, Yoda was not here, nor that coldest killer Windu. Only Jinn, and with him a mind so like my own had been before--before the fall of the White City--that I almost reached out to greet him like a brother.

Young Kenobi, this must be. How strong, to have kept his heart against all the Jedi's tricks. Oh, yes, I could feel him. His love and fear and loyalty burned like rich sunset over the green hills of K'marnye, like a torch in the Jeweled Caverns of Aa. Laughter like lightning; wonder as deep and fair as the Sea of Jade. And pain hot as heart's blood as his master tried to cage him in rules and the shackles of denial.

_My brother,_ I wanted to tell him, _Here is what you seek. Come; I will love and cherish you and help you become more than you are, where they would make you less._ But I knew he would not listen.

They call us Dark, you know. The Jedi. They say they are the Light and we are the enemy. But it is they who twisted our ancient order, drowning all our bright colors in their war of light and dark.

Good and Evil are traps; they have always been traps, turning men from love and laughter to the seductions of fanaticism and power--for the good of others, of course, or so they tell it. Dark? It is they who make the dark in the absolutism of their minds.

How blind, to see none of life's bright colors.

Yes, my robes are black now. Black for mourning--alas, O my lady, my lost Riana... And I have taken her deathmask for my own. But in my fairskinned youth I wore tunics of many-shaded aquamarine, adorned with coppergold to match my eyes and waist-long hair, and the bannered kites I gave to the wind were all the colors of Miharan spring.

The smell of pine I loved, and new bread, and the red-thorned lilies that grew on the high crags. Blood too, now, and while I cannot love the terrible smell of burning, yet I embrace it as the blade-edge of my grief.

_Brother,_ I wanted to say to this youth Kenobi. _What do you love? Tell it me, and I will share your joy._

_For you still love, I know it, though the Jedi would teach you that all things exist only to be used. They are cold, cold, these Jedi, and they would quench your bright fires and destroy your heart._

***

By the time I found Jinn in the desert sun, he had taken another victim. A younger boy, this time, though not as young as the Jedi most prefer to make into their tools. And this boy too burned brightly, his feelings Sith-strong with longing. Love, grief, fear, abandonment and hope-- most wasted of all, the hope, when the Jedi would train him to kill his own soul.

Even with all my hatred for Jinn, I almost turned aside to rescue the boy, but the Jedi cried out to him as if I meant him harm and the boy ran from me.

Doubled, then, was my anger as I leapt down to fight with Jinn. But even then, even as I flung myself into battle, I was not blind to the beauty of the world. O fair sun, bright sands, air hot as a lover's touch-- Even if I die now at this murderer's hands, know that I love you, even as I love this death-dance and the kiss of the singing blade.

Jinn's grey shadow could not stand against the passion of my heart, but even as I called Riana's name and prepared to strike, the coward took refuge in trickery and escaped.

Did I say coward? Oh no, of course, I meant honorable Jedi, brave Jedi, trained always to set the end before the means and care nothing for those they use.

Liars, betrayers, killers of children-- all for the good of the Council, and for the Light.

***

I fear for my master. Even as I told him of my failure, even as he sent me to Naboo where he knew Jinn and his victims would go next, I heard no true rage in his voice, no deep grief for his lost student Riana. Instead, there was only calculation.

Palpatine was true Sith once. I remember him singing late into the night, ballads and bawdy verse by turns until Riana and I silenced him with kisses. I remember how he would swim into the wind, laughing as the storms fought him on that blue, clear lake he loved with all his soul. I remember when he braided a cloak of autumn leaves to wrap me in, and how he wept with joy even as he called me a faun and did pagan worship of my body in the ripe orchards.

I remember when they broke him.

It was Windu they sent, of course, that darkest of all the cold killers who serve their Light. He was their best assassin, heartless and soulless, a gun in their hand to fire where they choose.

They did not know us, since they thought they had butchered us all five thousand years ago. But they had heard of a man called Sidious who helped three rebel poets escape their secret police, and they wanted him dead.

For once, though, they miscalculated. Even that bastard Jinn would have fought my master hand-to-hand, since Jinn prefers to see his victim's faces and test his control against their agony. But Windu, Windu cared nothing for how he killed, and preferred the remote clarity of a sniper's post.

We were on K'Marnye then, seeking the lost people of the hills. I tended a fire on the riverbank, loving the rich smell of smoke as much as the warmth it would bring to our cold evening, while Riana rubbed spices into meat for our skewers as she murmured a praise-song for the creature who died to give us food. Upstream, Palpatine sought among the mosses for onion grass to sweeten our broth, and his resonant baritone echoed playfully from the rocks as he called to it as to a child. "O onion grass, sweet loveling, where are you hiding? Come out, little one, come out and give us joy. O sweetest grass--"

And then we heard the shot.

Alone, Riana or I would have gone to him at once, though it cost our lives. But we feared for each other and stayed to shield, and so we heard the Jedi's flyer leaving even before our master's body came down upon us on the cold, cold water of his doom.

He lived. The assassin who shot him knew that the wound was mortal and did not stay to feel his spirit go, but Windu knew not that my heart'sjoy Riana was a healer. Even as she wept, her hands glowed silver with the power she summoned to his aid. And I gave her all my strength, little caring whether I died if those I loved would live.

But while she could bring such healing as years might give, she could not smooth scars away and make the broken whole. Windu's shot, angled from above, had pierced his throat and lung, and they would never be truly whole again.

His voice was lost, that joyful horn, and while the bare rasp of his new speech would sound normal to one who had never heard him, we soon learned he could no longer sing.

Nor could he dance, or swim, or fight with the bright swords he made, or share pleasure with us even when we held him safe and gently in our arms.

His lung was too damaged. Oh, he could breathe as well as most men needed, men of the cities under the Council's rules that kept them docile and easy to control. But any act of strength or strong emotion would drain him like a mortal wound as his breath faltered and his body was clawed with pain.

O master, beloved, teacher of my teacher, I grieve.

Even before the White City and the horror of Riana's death, he would not surrender to fate and let us seek a quiet home together. "We cannot let them win," he said. "If they break our bodies, we must fight them with mind and heart and will." And so, turning from our arms and the color of sunrise on the hills, putting aside the harvest's cider and savory stews and the laughter of children in the fields, he set himself to study the enemy.

I do not know just when he turned, if indeed it is as I fear. Was it his own maiming, or Riana's death, or my own withdrawal into grief? Was it the Jedi's taint that took him as he studied their ways too deeply? Or was it just his own determination, as he set his soul to seek nothing but revenge or death?

To see only the goal, and set aside all care for the path by which you seek it; that is how the Jedi defile their souls.

And I fear my master is lost to us forever.

**Author's Note:**

> I'd always taken the Light/Dark worldview of the Jedi on its own terms; it's not how I see the real world, but I didn't object to it in context.
> 
> But then I read a story by the incomparable torch (aka Flambeau) discussing Qui-Gon as an unprincipled sleaze--the kind of guy who'd risk a child's life for an engine part and leave even the child's own mother in slavery, either because he didn't care or because she might interfere with his control of her child. 
> 
> So I tried watching the movie again with my eyes open, and this time I didn't see either Lucas's Qui-Gon OR Flambeau's; I saw him through the eyes of a Maul who didn't believe the world should be divided into Light/Dark absolutes.


End file.
